All posts tagged ‘superhero’

Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes is the latest addition to the Lego DC Universe. I loved the first Lego Batman game so I was super excited to see that Lego was once again on good terms with the Bat and his friends.

One of the charms of the previous Lego games was the way the characters communicated with grunts and groans, verses words. The subtitles on the screen and their body language were enough to keep you informed on the story and added a little extra humor to game. Unlike in the previous game, this time the characters communicate with actual words instead of sounds and body language. This is a pretty big change for Lego and even though it’s a little weird, it’s not a bad change.

The story revolves around the usual Batman villains but with a surprise twist; Lex Luthor teams up with the Joker in an effort to create a mind controlling gas and brain wash the citizens into voting him for President of the United States. Since you can’t have Lex with out Superman, the man of steel eventually shows up to help out the capped crusader.

Batman has had many incarnations over the years. While I have observed the comic books from a distance, I have been a great fan of the movie representations. It began with the Adam West movie from 1966, which we had a VHS copy of that I watched religiously. In this movie I first encountered The Penguin, Catwoman, The Riddler, and The Joker. It is a much lighter version than any of the modern movies. Cesar Romero makes Jack Nicholson’s Joker look much closer in portrayal to Heath Ledger’s dark interpretation.

From a completely non-comic-fan aesthetic perspective, when Michael Keaton donned the cape and mask, I thought he made an impressive Batman, but not a particularly appealing Bruce Wayne. Val Kilmer I found to be the reverse, while George Clooney I shall just gloss over, though I do enjoy the image he provided. Christian Bale has taken to the role with aplomb in both identities and I have thoroughly enjoyed the recent movies.

Andrea will be heading in to Coney Island this weekend to photograph the annual Mermaid Parade. Then early next week she’ll be helping out PopCap Games, acting as one of many witnesses as a brave, brave soul tries to beat the “Longest Computer Card Game” Guinness World Record by playing 30 hours of Solitaire Blitz!

Nicole Wakelin is playing with a Chevy Malibu loaner car all week. There are so many buttons. She is hoping she doesn’t accidentally hit the Seat Eject that she’s sure is there somewhere.

Marziah will be attending the KC area Maker Faire this weekend. Be sure to say “hi” if you see her there.

Sarah is looking forward to defeating Mount laundry this weekend while listening to the Sesame Street gang on vinyl, and watching her son play with his new Playmobil characters. She hopes to finally sit down and begin watching season one of Sherlock and finish a long overdue crochet project.

As she’s typing this, Patricia is within 2 hours of being home from her week-long trip to the Northeast. She enjoyed her husband’s family reunion in Pennsylvania as well as a couple days with her parents in West Virginia. The kids stayed up north for a couple weeks with the grandparents and Patricia has great plans to really catch up on her life: cleaning the house, catching up on GeekMom product reviews and preparing to take over as webmaster for her base spouses’ club website, which needs some work.

Rebecca Angel is currently alone in the house since her kids and husband are away. Originally, she thought this would lead to craziness like watching movies and reading books all day, but instead she is completing projects and cleaning the house. It’s still a good start to summer.

This week Kelly Knox is excited to take her daughter to see Recess Monkey in concert under the big top. The energetic kindie band is performing at Teatro ZinZanni in Seattle for their “In Tents” circus-themed show.

Chaos Mandy is very excited to take her daughter to see Brave in theaters this weekend. It will be the first Disney/Pixar movie she will see on the big screen.

Natania is settling into life with her one month old and rambunctious almost six year old as summer vacation gets into full swing. This week she will be a guest panelist at ConTemporal, a local convention in Chapel Hill, NC, where she’ll be an adult for a bit and will escape the world of diapers and spit-up for a short time. She’s most excited to be writing again after her brain was taken hostage by pregnancy hormones! Additionally, her son and she have been enjoying the heck out of Keane’s newest album, Strangeland, and have been subsequently daydreaming about visiting England again (not to mention contemplating buying a digital piano).

Judy Berna will be mothering six children for the next two weeks, as her nephew and neice from San Fransisco joined the gang on Tuesday. The next fourteen days will be full of exploring the mountains, riding bikes, jumping on trampolines, eating endless meals, and making lifetime memories with cousins. In the early mornings, as exhausted kids sleep in, Judy will be plugging away at getting her book ready for publication and keeping up with the fun list of GeekMom posts she’s working on.

Corrina is pleased with The Library Journal review of her superhero novella, Luminous, which pronounced the story a “good start on the beachy book season.” She’s currently busy preparing activities to keep the kids busy this summer. She foresees much use of her Six Flags season passes.

Dakster will be on the sidelines this Saturday so her husband can troop a young child’s memorial service. A few weeks ago, a young Jedi lost his two and a half year battle with brain cancer and his parents have asked the 501st Legion to be in attendance for a celebration of his life. Many of my squad mates trooped his birthday party last year, so this will be a rough troop for many. It will be one of those days that wearing a helmet will be blessing as it will allow them to hide their tears…

Brigid has decided that the secret to a healthy business is to go on vacation. She swears she’s never so desirable as when she’s 1,500 miles from her studio and almost completely inaccessible!

Melissa Wiley is heading to Anaheim this weekend for the ALA Annual meeting, where she plans to discuss a ton of books and eat a ton of food. Until then, she’s hanging out in her yard hoping for another sighting of the ladder-backed woodpecker she spotted yesterday — a sight to make her bird-geek’s heart skip a beat.

Ruth spent last week recovering from Southeast LinuxFest by doing a 2400-mile road trip in six days, no kids. New Orleans, the Great River Road, Memphis, Nashville–all delicious. The Sunsphere in Knoxville still looks just like it did when she last saw it, at the World’s Fair in 1982.

“Popular culture has not yet designed a female superhero that was more badass than the actual Marie Curie.” –Hank Green

But the internet is a funny place. Netizens are suckers for novelty and notoriously forgetful, so even though she’s been featured on GeekMom several times, it serves us well to frequently remind the world that when it comes to life and science, women can make “something out of nothing.” Especially those of us who are as resolute of purpose as Marie Curie:

“I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me [a wedding dress], please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.” –Marie Curie

She was also Altruistic:

“…each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity…”

And dauntless:

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.”

And in all likelihood, as the woman so profoundly down-to-earth that she had both of her Nobel prizes melted down and put to better use than simply serving to remind people of her excellence, Marie Curie would probably disapprove of any hero-worship we might perform in her honor. In spite of how radically her accomplishments changed our world for the better, I wouldn’t be surprised if Marie Curie’s most persistent message is that women’s work – by women’s work, of course I mean science – is never finished.

“One never notices what has been done; one only sees what remains to be done.” –Marie Curie

Here at GeekMom, we’ve had some discussion about the differences between the way male and female characters are portrayed in comic books, action movies, and video games. See here for a look at how an anime drawing instruction book blundered on this topic, and see here for an examination of comic book portrayals of female characters. BleedingCool.com also had a great post on male superheroes posing like Wonder Woman here, Kate Beaton’s “Hark a Vagrant” comic tackled the subject here, and artist Kevin Bolk made a great gender-swapping “Avengers” poster here.

Photo by Amy Hines / Used with permission

Now fantasy author Jim C. Hines has taken on the topic. Specifically, Hines decided to try to match the pose of one of the female characters on the cover of his own book, The Stepsister Scheme. Then he tried on a few other books’ poses (and costumes). The results are funny, but also eye-opening, especially because Hines talks about the pain and cramping these poses cause and the physical impossibility of achieving some of them. Says Hines: “My sense is that most of these covers are supposed to convey strong, sexy heroines, but these are not poses that suggest strength. You can’t fight from these stances. I could barely even walk.”

Why does it seem so impossible for artists to convey “woman” and “strong” without veering into “thrusty/bendy/sexualized”? Click here for Jim’s full post.

I’ve played quite a few role-playing games (of the rolling dice sort) over the years. I started out with D&D and then played quite a bit of World of Darkness in college. But of all the systems I’ve ever played, HERO Games is my favorite.

I was introduced to HERO Games when my husband and I made our first friends after moving to North Carolina. They were a geeky couple like we were and they were looking for some gamers to join them in a weekly game. I jumped at the chance because it had been years since I had been in a regular game. The system they played in was HERO Games.

It took a little while to get used to the new system, but I quickly fell in love. Character creation can take a while because it is a system that is very character orientated. But there is a computer program, HERO Designer, that speeds up the process a great deal.

You can play any sort of game you want in HERO from fantasy games to superhero ones to anything in between. There is combat like in other role-playing games, but the stories tend to be more character driven. I’ve played in games that there was little to no combat but it’s still very fun.

When you create your character, you decide on a variety of things like strength, intelligence and other things you would find in other games. You can put points into how attractive your character as well, which is a neat little quirk of the system. But the most interesting thing, to me, is that you get to give your character advantages and disadvantages.

The disadvantages can make the games very interesting, especially if your GM uses them. I think the most unique disadvantage I’ve seen was in my best friend’s first HERO Games character. Her character was completely blind, which is a huge disadvantage. It made things difficult for the whole party sometimes, but it made things interesting as well.

For anyone who might be looking for a new role-playing system to play in, I would greatly recommend HERO Games. It will probably always be my favorite system because of the story and character driven elements to it.

I love baking cakes, especially ones that are geeky and challenging. Some of my favorites that I have made are a TARDIS for my husbands 30th birthday and a Mad Hatter hat for my sister’s high school graduation party. In any case, its no wonder that I have collected quite the set of geek cake inspiration from across the internet. With wedding season upon us, its hard not to focus on the wedding cake, the traditional tiered white cake with beautifully piped flowers. Those traditional cakes are usually absolutely beautiful but are totally not befitting a true geeky couple by any means. Most of the time, the geekiness shows up in the grooms cake, however, once in a while you get a wonderfully brave couple who kicks tradition to the curb and you are left with geeky wedding cake masterpieces.

Enjoy, there should be a little something for everyone here!

For the Math Nerd: xkcd Wedding Cake

From Pink Cake Box

I hope you noticed that it says: sqrt(<3) or the root of love; cos(<3) the cause of love; and [1 0; 0 1]<3 the identity of love. So incredibly romantic!

For the Whovians: The Tardis

From MammaJammaCakes Flickr photostream

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed and Something BLUE!

The Daleks

From Kate Hibbs Flickr photostream

CONSUMATE!

For the X-Philes Out There:

From 3ElizabethLove flickr photostream

The truth is out there, and its love!

(Thanks to fellow GeekMom Sophie for pointing this one out to me, I love it!)

For the Superhero Nut!

Original Source Unknown from DailySloth

“Do you DC Comics take Marvel Comics to be your wife?”

For Those Who Live in a Steampunk World!

From exoskeletoncabaret Flickr Photostream

I’m in love with this cake! It is just so incredibly steampunk! My husband is lucky that I didn’t see this before our wedding!

Scrabble Fans

from Pink Cake Box

I only wish I could get words that long in Scrabble. HA!

For the Stargate Fans

From Gate World Forum - "DrScareys event horizon V1.0" Wedding Cake

I wonder where their honeymoon was?

Dungeons and Dragons

From HimeKarisuta Flickr Photostream

Sadly, I don’t know much about D&D, but this is an awesome enough cake I think it is time to give it a chance!

For the Old School Tetris Lovers

From A Piece of Cake

The Cake Topper was made of blocks to spell “J” and “C”, after they cut the cake, the bride and groom took the topper apart and found where they fit on the main part of the cake.

For the Lego Fans

Well that’s one way to build your relationship! I really love how this is so pretty and geeky at the same time.

For the Trekkies

Original source unknown, found on Wedinator

“Marriage, the final frontier. These are the voyages of Mr. and Mrs.. . Her five-year mission: To explore strange new worlds, seek out new life, new civilizations. To Boldly go where no man has gone before!”

Star Wars

Original Source Unknown, found on Wedinator

Han and Leia’s Wedding Cake!

If I missed your favorite geeky cake put a link to it here in the comments!

Last week was a horrible week for me at work and I was so overwhelmed that I decided to go get a manicure. I’ve been getting my nails done since I was in high school and have always stuck to a very simple french manicure. This time though, I really didn’t want something boring and average. So, I did some research. Initially I was looking for Hello Kitty nail designs (I’m a HUGE fan of that adorable mouthless kitty) but nothing really caught my eye. I switched gears then and started searching for nerdy/geeky nail designs and stumbled upon several different kinds of nail art that would be just perfect for GeekMoms, especially with Mother’s Day right around the corner.

For the Lego afficianados among us: the Lego manicure complete with blocks and Lego logo:

Lego Nail art photo via daily-nail.blogspot.com

For the superhero fans, why not pay an homage to all your favorites on your corpus unguis?

super hero nail art - photo via nailartgallery.nailsmag.com

But if you don’t have time to head over to the nail salon and request any of these outrageously nerdy nails there is an easy DIY manicure that will do the trick. Newsprint Nails (pictured in the beginning of this post) are so easy I could probably have my 17 month old daughter do them for me (except, not really because she’d probably try to eat the newspaper). I originally found this manicure on a blog called La Passion du Nail Art and the instructions were all in French, with only three years of college French under my belt I copied and pasted the instructions into a word document and hit “translate.”

All you need for these super-easy and totally geeked-out nails are the following materials:

Nail polish, preferrably in a light or nude tone so the print really shows up

Alcohol (for some reason the french blog says to use vodka but I just used regualr rubbing alcohol and that worked just fine)

Newspaper clippings

Clear topcoat

I had to try this for myself since, when I went to the salon armed with my own newspaper and clear how-to instructions, the manicurist was not too willing to experiment. I went home and tried to dip my already top-coated nails into alcohol and apply the newsprint to get the desired effect. I pressed as hard as I could but still got nothing. Not wanting to ruin a manicure I paid for, I recruited my boyfriend into being my guinea pig. I grabbed a bottle of Pepto-pink nail polish and polished one of his nails with two coats. After letting it dry for a few minutes, I dipped his nail in alcohol and pressed a newspaper clipping to his nail (I chose the crossword puzzle section — but imagine the possibilities; horoscopes, comic strips, sports section what ever suits you best). A few moments later I peeled the clipping away and it did smudge a bit but that’s because I’m overly-enthusiastic and didn’t let the nail dry completely.

my boyfriend's pepto-pink newsprint nail

Ultimately, the manicure is an exceptionally easy one and it would be something nice to do for yourself for Mother’s Day, or you can get your little geeklings involved if they’re old enough to know not to drink the alcohol or eat the newspaper.

Since we continue to be snowed in I have an all points bulletin out for things to do with my Geekette. She has been out of school since January 28th (one sick day the rest due to our mountains of snow) and everyone is getting on each others nerves happy to be spending so much time together. She loves crafting and this site recently came across my radar.

Cubeecraft (pronounced kyoob-ee) provides free paper craft toys! All you do is download, print on some card stock, cut, and fold. They are rated for difficulty with one scissors being the basic model and five scissors being the most difficult. Their newest creation is Mr. Spock. They have many kid friendly ones like Oscar the Grouch, Wall-E, Spider Man, Hello Kitty and R2D2 to name a few. There are also some that are not so kid friendly like Kane from Alien.

I foresee hours of entertainment without having to leave the house, at least until we run out of printer ink.

So NBC debuted its new superhero show last Sunday. The Cape is about a honest cop who’s framed as the baddest criminal mastermind in town, then presumed dead after a big explosion. He meets up with some circus people (who actually rob banks), and they give him a sort of magical cape and teach him some disappearing illusions. And then he seeks revenge on the aforementioned criminal mastermind.

Confused? It doesn’t matter. The show isn’t very good, and it probably won’t last long. But my problem with The Cape isn’t about the cheesy dialogue, the jumpy pacing, or the plot holes. Nope, it’s all about character motivation.

You see, our honest cop hero, Vince Faraday, is set up as the world’s greatest dad, the most loving husband, the ultimate family man. But when all this trouble goes down, he … has no problem letting his wife and son believe he’s dead? He’s fine with leaving them to mourn and grieve, while his wife struggles to bear all the responsibilities of a newly single parent and his son goes fatherless — just so he can pursue some half-baked vendetta that is clearly going to take years to accomplish? I mean, the guy is working on building up his tolerance to poisons — something tells me that is not a speedy process.

At one point, one of the circus people tells Vince to go get his wife and kid and get out of town. He even hands over train tickets he’s already bought for Vince and his family. While watching this part of the show, I was actually yelling at the screen: “Good idea! Do that! Go be a good father to your kid like you supposedly used to be!” I mean, he’s already presumed dead, so disappearing and starting a new life somewhere shouldn’t be that difficult, and even if it is difficult, perhaps he could pour all the energy he’s devoting to superheroics into protecting his family.

But no, Vince is a Faraday, and Faradays have always lived in this town, and they’re fighters, and some other nonsense that’s shoehorned awkwardly into the episode in a flashback where Vince explains his family legacy to his then-infant son. Shenanigans, utter shenanigans.

Look, I get that superheroes need to stay and fight the bad guys, to stand up for justice instead of walking away, etc. But there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of superheroes with spouses and kids. Because if you’re lucky enough to have a great marriage and a child, you don’t walk away from that to go hide out in your lair, fashion yourself a leather mask, and stand around meaningfully on top of buildings.

Note to The Cape‘s creators: Don’t inject parenting into my geeky superhero fantasies. It just brings out my inner realist and ruins everything.

Ellen Henderson is a novelist and web strategist. She lives in Dallas, Texas, with her husband and son.

I’m not a lawyer, but in my non-GeekMom hours I work at a law firm. In the four years I’ve been working in Attorney Land, I’ve picked up a bit of knowledge about legal issues and procedures, and I’ve even learned to say “pro bono” without giggling.

“Law and the Multiverse” is the brainchild of two twenty-something lawyers, James Daily and Ryan Davidson, and it dissects common comic book situations and attempts to parse the legal fallout that would result when, say, “Joker blows up half of downtown Gotham.” Who is responsible for the property damage? Can supervillains get insurance?

Law nerds and superheroes geeks should definitely check this out. And take a look at the New York Times piece about the blog and its creators while you’re at it.

Ellen Henderson is a novelist and web strategist. She lives in Dallas, Texas, with her husband and son.